Are you using Flickr to promote your business?

• Lilach Bullock (Socialable)
• Tuesday 27 March 2012

Do you know what Flickr is? To put it simply, Flickr is a photo management application that is dedicated to fulfilling their two goals:

1. They want to help people share their photos with others who matter to them, like friends, family, business contacts. There’s nothing like a photo to bring people scattered all over the world together.
2. The people behind Flickr are crazy about creating new ways of organizing photos and video and making it easy for users to organize and store their precious digital memories. As a user, you can allow all your contacts and friends to comment on your photos and even reorganize them.

While those two applications are very useful, Flickr is way more than a simple photo storage facility, it’s actually a powerful tool for small businesses to reach customers and to promote their products or services.

To make Flickr accessible to anyone, they have a free account that allows you to upload 100MB of photos and two videos a month. There is also a Pro account, with more tools. If you choose a paid Pro account, $24.95 currently for a year, you get unlimited uploads, collections and storage, ad-free browsing and account stats.

Flickr is essentially an easy social networking application that can be specifically used to promote and grow your business.

If you add Flickr to your business, you will benefit from increased search engine indexing. Google and Bing consider Flickr as a major component in the social aspects of searches. For you, that means better Search Engine Optimization (SEO). When your photos start collecting more “Likes,” and are more frequent in search queries, your business will naturally get more exposure.

Quick Tip: Make sure you properly tag and describe your images.

You can create brand awareness with Flickr by uploading images and allowing your viewers to share and reuse them. This is ideal for bloggers – we all need images, right? As your photos are on the Internet, your brand is getting recognition. Any small business can see the value of that!

It is common knowledge that connecting to some of the powerful social networking sites can be a nightmare. Not so with Flickr. When you upload your public photos on Flickr, real time updates are sent to Facebook, Twitter and the Yahoo! homepage, Mail and Pulse. You can post directly on your blog from Flickr by setting up a connection to your blogging service. There is a great Flickr to WordPress plugin here – link it brings images into your dashboard.

A quick Google search will show you more plugins for WordPress that enable you to have Flickr albums and galleries as part of your blog.

In today’s marketing world, a simple photo posting site has become a quiet, but powerful marketing social site. Is it part of your marketing mix?

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